Opinion | A Story About Salmon That Almost Had a Happy Ending
Completion of the world’s largest dam removal project — which demolished four Klamath River hydroelectric dams on both sides of the California-Oregon border — has been celebrated as a monumental achievement, signaling the emerging political power of Native American tribes and the river-protection movement.
True enough. It is fortunate that the project was approved in 2022 and completed last October, before the environmentally hostile Trump administration could interfere, and it is a reminder that committed, persistent campaigning for worthy environmental goals can sometimes overcome even the most formidable obstacles.
How tribal leaders, commercial fisherman and a few modestly sized environmental groups won an uphill campaign to dismantle the dams is a serpentine, setback-studded saga worthy of inclusion in a collection of inspirational tales. The number of dams, their collective height (400 feet) and the extent of potential river habitat that has been reopened to salmon (420 miles) are all unprecedented.
The event is a crucial turning point, marking an end to efforts to harness the Klamath’s overexploited waterways to generate still more economic productivity, and at last addressing the basin’s many environmental problems by subtracting technology instead of adding it, by respecting nature instead of trying to overcome it. It’s an acknowledgment that dams have lifetimes, like everything else, and that their value in hydropower and irrigated water often ends up being dwarfed by their enormous environmental and social costs.
But removing the Klamath dams is no panacea. It is a necessary but far from sufficient step toward restoring the serially ravaged Klamath River basin, once home to the nation’s third-largest salmon fishery, so thick with salmon before the arrival of Euro-Americans that local tribal members still speak of the time, possibly mythical, when their ancestors could walk across the river on migrating salmons’ backs.
By the turn of this century, all of the river’s seven salmon species were extinct or headed that way, and the basin’s tribes suffered from diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cultural breakdown in their absence.
The first Euro-American known to set foot in the Klamath basin, Peter Skene Ogden, in 1826, brought with him Western ideas about capitalism, resource extraction and the disposability of natural landscapes — and began the basin’s environmental dismemberment. He led a beaver-trapping expedition for the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose 40 or so members trudged up and down the Maryland-size basin in pursuit of furs to meet European demand for beaver hats.
So many trapping expeditions followed Ogden’s that within a few decades, the basin’s beavers were gone. Without the calm produced by beaver dams (which, unlike man-made dams, are water-permeable), rivers and streams flowed more rapidly, producing erosion and sediment that smothered fish-spawning grounds and upset water bodies’ chemical balances.
Over the second half of the 19th century, miners, loggers and salmon and sucker canners took turns despoiling the basin.
In their search for gold, the miners deployed huge dredging machines that destroyed riverbeds. They blasted away whole hillsides by diverting entire creek systems into water cannons that pushed out powerful jets through giant nozzles at a rate of 30,000 gallons a minute — so-called hydraulic mining. The process spread astonishing quantities of sediment throughout downstream rivers and passages, clogging fish habitat, and the mercury used to separate gold from sediment contaminated waterways and food chains.
Loggers found that the trees lining basin riverbanks, including majestic Ponderosa pines, were easiest to reach, so they generated still more erosion when the trees were cut down. They turned the rivers into product conveyances, floating the logs downstream. The logs scoured riverbeds and shorelines and sometimes became entangled in mile-long snarls that were dislodged with dynamite, killing fish and further damaging fish habitat.
Environmental health wasn’t a consideration.
But none of these depredations produced as much environmental damage as the undermining of the upper basin’s hydrology carried out by farmers, ranchers and their allies in the federal government. Early in the 20th century, they drained two of the Klamath’s three largest lakes and most of its wetlands to create agricultural fields. The loss of those two lakes and about 80 percent of the basin’s wetlands is the blow from which the upper basin can’t recover.
It’s perhaps unjust to label the lake-drainers as villains, as they were merely mimicking what had already happened throughout much of the United States in the 19th century, and they were oblivious to drainage’s long-term consequences. But over time it eliminated the upper basin water systems’ resilience.
Before Euro-Americans’ arrival, the upper basin was a unique watery landscape miraculously perched on top of sagebrush-dry terrain, in the 4,000-foot-altitude high desert of south-central Oregon and far-northeastern California. Upper Klamath Lake, the lake that survives, was smaller than Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake, the two drained lakes. The three lakes, nestled close to one another at slightly different altitudes and interspersed with large tracts of wetlands, each had their own rhythm and composition: Tule Lake’s water level, for example, rose and fell over a 20-year cycle, while Lower Klamath Lake fluctuated on a seasonal and yearly basis.
The variations from lake to lake and from lake to wetlands fostered biodiversity. Two species of suckers are sacred to the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, the predominant upper basin tribe that is an agglomeration of three separate tribes required by the federal government in 1864; a juvenile sucker could grow up in relatively protected wetland waters, then circulate as an adult in more treacherous Upper Klamath Lake. But without the wetlands and two of the three lakes, the sucker population was vulnerable. By the 1990s, populations of the two sucker species had plummeted, and they are now on the verge of extinction.
To the farmers and ranchers of the early 20th century, the wetlands were useless quagmires, riddled with insects and inhospitable to humans — the word “wetlands” didn’t even come into common usage until the 1950s, when their invaluable ecosystem benefits began to be understood.
Wetlands acted as the Klamath ecosystems’ kidneys and lungs: They filtered pollutants, captured nutrients that juvenile fish ate, and, as a result of their spongy composition, mitigated natural upheavals by retaining water during floods and releasing it during droughts. By eliminating the wetlands and drastically reducing lake water, the basin’s settlers rendered Upper Klamath Lake incapable of performing the ecological services that the three lakes had carried out together for thousands of years.
The basin’s hydroelectric dams, built between 1918 and 1962, were merely the crowning blows, the walls across the river that definitively blocked salmon from upper basin spawning grounds. By the end of the 20th century, the Klamath basin contained only about 5 percent of the salmon numbers that existed before Ogden began setting his traps nearly two centuries earlier.
Back when the lakes were drained, the upper basin was an unlikely national trendsetter. Irrigation throughout the arid American West was jump-started by what Donald Worster, author of the 1985 classic “Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West,” calls “the most important single piece of legislation in the history of the West” — the National Reclamation Act of 1902. The Klamath Reclamation Project, which made farming possible there, was the largest of the 12 projects in the first tranche authorized by the act. Since then, so-called Project farmers, some now in their fourth and fifth generation, have relied on irrigated water diverted from Upper Klamath Lake.
But with the arrival of extended drought intensified by climate change at the turn of this century, the basin’s vulnerability was exposed. By then, the two revered fish species, the Lost River and shortnose suckers (c’waam and koptu to upper basin tribes), had been listed as endangered, and coho salmon that still populated the lower basin were designated as threatened.
When, adhering to provisions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation suspended water deliveries to Project farmers in April 2001 so that more water would remain in Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River to benefit fish, it set off a social conflagration. Outraged farmers carried out acts of civil disobedience in protests that went on for four months. The cutoff led some Project farmers to sell their properties to bigger operators or go into bankruptcy; at least one died by suicide.
Though the drought continued, the next year the George W. Bush administration made sure that the farmers got their allocations, but that left so little water in the Klamath River that disease spread among spawning salmon, resulting in the deaths of some 70,000 salmon whose carcasses washed onto the shores of the lower river in September 2002, in the biggest fish die-off in the history of the American West. Lower basin tribes mourned.
The basin, in other words, was in the grip of revolving crises. And as the upper basin continued to dry out throughout this century, Project farmers received scant water allocations in most years, and more and more of them went out of business.
The same story of agricultural decline is now unfolding throughout the West, as the century-long irrigation era edges toward collapse. Depletion of groundwater for agriculture is so widespread that “it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower,” a New York Times investigation found in 2023.
“The ongoing megadrought has severely contracted water supply and rendered Western agriculture inviable at its present scale,” wrote the legal scholars Stephanie Stern and A. Dan Tarlock in a paper published in December in the Ecology Law Quarterly. “An increasing number of farms, particularly small farms, are shuttering agricultural operations, filing bankruptcy, fallowing fields, slaughtering livestock and selling water rights. And the pain is only beginning.”
Dam removal has already restored the Klamath’s reputation as a trendsetter, a $500 million signifier of dams’ environmental harm and the feasibility of dismantling them. Now it has a chance to do something even more important: show a way toward environmentally sustainable agriculture. In the first large salmon run since dam removal was completed, at least 6,000 salmon swam upstream past the demolished dam sites, exceeding biologists’ expectations by orders of magnitude.
As a result, many upper basin residents were feeling something they were unaccustomed to: hope. River-rafting outfitters began mapping out portions of the river exposed by dam removal, including steep, fast-moving rapids and newly formed streams that reflect the river’s revival. In the restored portion of the river, great blue herons have already established rookeries, and bald eagles are, as a surveying rafter put it, “all over the place.”
Thinking in watershed terms has long been an environmental tenet; now salmon are making the idea come alive. Their presence in the upper Klamath is spreading awareness of the interconnectedness of the whole basin, prompting cooperation between entities at both ends, from upper basin farming districts to the coastal Yurok tribe.
At the base of the Klamath’s potential recovery is the redressing of Euro-Americans’ most egregious environmental sin, their draining of upper basin wetlands. Some Project farmers resist wetland restoration, understandably viewing it as a way of shrinking agricultural fields. But expansive wetlands could be the remaining farms’ best hope, preventing the lowering of water tables and the ongoing drying-out of the upper basin.
In December, in what was conceived as the first phase of the largest freshwater wetland restoration project ever carried out in the Western United States, a contractor hired by the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, Ducks Unlimited and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began breaching a 60-year-old dike that had separated 22 square miles of wetlands from Upper Klamath Lake and had turned the drained wetlands into cattle pasture. This and other restoration projects made it possible to imagine that the long-running Klamath River recovery epic, full of reversals that were overcome, was finally approaching a just, environmentally responsible resolution.
In the past month, however, the Trump administration suspended funding authorized in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other Biden-era legislation for the wetlands restoration and other Klamath projects, and laid off U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees who facilitated those projects.
“These are small rural communities, and these investments are a big deal to local economies,” said Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Humboldt Area Foundation, which funds Klamath River restoration projects. “These are projects that improve people’s lives, and now they’re frozen. The uncertainty is just frustrating people. No one knows what to do.”
Coming so close to a happy ending to the long-running Klamath saga, these rash, heedless cuts may be the cruelest setback of all.
Jacques Leslie is a contributing opinion writer for The Los Angeles Times and the author of “Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment.” He is writing a book about the last 25 years in the Klamath basin.
Jordan Gale is a photographer based in Portland, Ore., specializing in long-form narrative photo essays. He has been photographing the Klamath River since 2021.
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